3 ms·

> DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology ... Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.

by spwa4 1y ago

water-data-dude 1y ago
The transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, so they send in a bunch of 8 year olds to "fix" the technology ;)
jorts 1y ago
It was all incredibly reckless.
CrossVR 1y ago
I'd trust the 20 somethings more than the AI model.
- spwa4 1y ago
  I think we can all agree that the whole thing was an incredibly bad idea.
  - Incipient 1y ago
    Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash. Absolutely everyone can get behind a more efficient government with less corruption (the idea of a business man cutting corruption is nuts). The execution however, as is often the case, was awful (leave it up to the individual to decide if that was deliberate or not).
    - jackstraw42 1y ago
      It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are. The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash. The idea was trash, too. The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
    - blitzar 1y ago
      The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        Yeah, I still can't understand how people don't get it yet. They never wanted to reduce the deficit whatsoever, they just wanted to cut spending on things they didn't personally like. The point was never to "save money" for the United States. They might as well have said the point was to save puppies -- it's just a framing they adopted so people would say "I agree with it in spirit". Instead of focusing on and pointing out the corrupt intent, you say you actually agree with their intent. Diabolical really. Come to think of it, they did it with immigration to. DOGE was going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse. ICE was going to get rid of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Who can disagree wit that goal? You don't support MURDER do you?! But just as DOGE didn't live up to their promise, ICE went after landscapers, builders, and farmers and people are surprised Pikachu over it. "But I thought he said just the violent criminals..."
        red-iron-pine 1y ago
        their main goal was to gut oversight orgs, and kick off the largest PII breach in history
    - epistasis 1y ago
      The idea was based on a lie: that most of what the government does is waste. So no, the idea was very very bad.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized. Look at it like this: > About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.” So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality. But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation. When your household expenses are 38% higher than your household income, you don't fix it by eliminating the 3% you spend on refuelling your car. The USA federal budget in 2024 was 38% higher than its income, DOGE claims to have saved about 3%: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Fy2024_federal_budget.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Fy2024_f... When "your household" is a metaphor for "a government", the obvious other things they can do include: • Just directly ordering itself more income (taxes) • Literally printing more money to reducing the burden of existing interest payments that are 4 times what DOGE claims to have saved • Increasing the pension age, broadening the tax base and reducing the expense for whatever the USA's federal pension is. Every year of increase to the federal pension age makes about as much difference as DOGE claims to have made. • In the USA's case sorting out the mess that is how Medicare (12.7% of federal spending) and Medicaid (9% of federal spending) spend more per person than the UK spends on the NHS despite Medicare and Medicaid being in addition to all that private healthcare and also despite the combination of public and private American health spending giving worse average life expectancy. This would free up by far the largest amount of money in the overall economy, but you may have to pretend in this already hypothetical scenario that the federal government first nationalised all the insurance payments before you see it impact the combined budget of taxes-and-insurance. • Even just shrink the armed forces (12.5% of federal spending) from "biggest by a large margin" to "biggest by a smaller margin". • Encouraging as many working-age foreigners as possible to come and do work while being registered as taxpayers.
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  AI told me 7 of 9 CVEs were exploited in the wild. Copilot gave me a different 7 than ChatGPT. Both were wrong about at least one. My intern, a goofy 20 year old EE student, got different results too, but he at least was able to tell me "i'm not sure" and give me real links to where he looked.
ben_w 1y ago
Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction. Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK. And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word. * Heard and McDonald Islands, IIRC

> DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology ... Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.

by spwa4 1y ago

> DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology ... Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.

water-data-dude 1y ago

The transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, so they send in a bunch of 8 year olds to "fix" the technology ;)

jorts 1y ago

It was all incredibly reckless.

CrossVR 1y ago

I'd trust the 20 somethings more than the AI model.

spwa4 1y ago
I think we can all agree that the whole thing was an incredibly bad idea.
- Incipient 1y ago
  Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash. Absolutely everyone can get behind a more efficient government with less corruption (the idea of a business man cutting corruption is nuts). The execution however, as is often the case, was awful (leave it up to the individual to decide if that was deliberate or not).
  - jackstraw42 1y ago
    It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are. The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash. The idea was trash, too. The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
  - blitzar 1y ago
    The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      Yeah, I still can't understand how people don't get it yet. They never wanted to reduce the deficit whatsoever, they just wanted to cut spending on things they didn't personally like. The point was never to "save money" for the United States. They might as well have said the point was to save puppies -- it's just a framing they adopted so people would say "I agree with it in spirit". Instead of focusing on and pointing out the corrupt intent, you say you actually agree with their intent. Diabolical really. Come to think of it, they did it with immigration to. DOGE was going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse. ICE was going to get rid of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Who can disagree wit that goal? You don't support MURDER do you?! But just as DOGE didn't live up to their promise, ICE went after landscapers, builders, and farmers and people are surprised Pikachu over it. "But I thought he said just the violent criminals..."
      - red-iron-pine 1y ago
        their main goal was to gut oversight orgs, and kick off the largest PII breach in history
  - epistasis 1y ago
    The idea was based on a lie: that most of what the government does is waste. So no, the idea was very very bad.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized. Look at it like this: > About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.” So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality. But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation. When your household expenses are 38% higher than your household income, you don't fix it by eliminating the 3% you spend on refuelling your car. The USA federal budget in 2024 was 38% higher than its income, DOGE claims to have saved about 3%: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Fy2024_federal_budget.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Fy2024_f... When "your household" is a metaphor for "a government", the obvious other things they can do include: • Just directly ordering itself more income (taxes) • Literally printing more money to reducing the burden of existing interest payments that are 4 times what DOGE claims to have saved • Increasing the pension age, broadening the tax base and reducing the expense for whatever the USA's federal pension is. Every year of increase to the federal pension age makes about as much difference as DOGE claims to have made. • In the USA's case sorting out the mess that is how Medicare (12.7% of federal spending) and Medicaid (9% of federal spending) spend more per person than the UK spends on the NHS despite Medicare and Medicaid being in addition to all that private healthcare and also despite the combination of public and private American health spending giving worse average life expectancy. This would free up by far the largest amount of money in the overall economy, but you may have to pretend in this already hypothetical scenario that the federal government first nationalised all the insurance payments before you see it impact the combined budget of taxes-and-insurance. • Even just shrink the armed forces (12.5% of federal spending) from "biggest by a large margin" to "biggest by a smaller margin". • Encouraging as many working-age foreigners as possible to come and do work while being registered as taxpayers.
red-iron-pine 1y ago
AI told me 7 of 9 CVEs were exploited in the wild. Copilot gave me a different 7 than ChatGPT. Both were wrong about at least one. My intern, a goofy 20 year old EE student, got different results too, but he at least was able to tell me "i'm not sure" and give me real links to where he looked.

ben_w 1y ago

Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction. Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK. And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word. * Heard and McDonald Islands, IIRC